


The Fault in His Heartbeat

by WriterJace



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Foggy Nelson needs a hug, Gen, Happy Sexual Assault Awareness Month to everyone!, I Wrote This Instead of Getting Therapy, Sexual Assault, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23654194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WriterJace/pseuds/WriterJace
Summary: Matt knew the sound of Foggy’s heart, could recognise it in a sea of students with 100% certainty if he concentrated enough. After three years living in one room together, Matt felt like he had a pretty good idea of what the sounds of Foggy’s heart meant. But there was one thing that still puzzled Matt, even after so many hours spent together.
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	The Fault in His Heartbeat

**Author's Note:**

> Please check the tags for this one!

Matt tried to give Foggy as much privacy as he could, he really did. It was just that being in such close quarters with someone all the time made that very difficult. So even though he tried not to, Matt knew every smell that made Foggy _Foggy_ , from his aftershave over the artificial snacks he liked to munch on in the evenings right down to the smells that told him that Foggy’d spent the hours away from his dorm having sex and with whom.

He knew all the sounds too, of Foggy’s heavy breathing when they had to hurry to a class and slight snoring when he wasn’t feeling well.

And Matt knew the sound of Foggy’s heart, could recognise it in a sea of students with 100% certainty if he concentrated enough.

After three years living in one room together, Matt felt like he had a pretty good idea of what the sounds of Foggy’s heart meant. Foggy wasn’t a good liar, he was too honest for that, so correlating the little irregularities in his heartbeat with the obvious white lies he sometimes told Matt was no feat. He knew what fear and excitement and nervousness sounded like.

But there was one thing that still puzzled Matt, even after so many hours spent together. Foggy’s heart sometimes... skipped. And there seemed to be no apparent reason for it. They would just be having a normal conversation, and something must trigger that response.

_They were at a bar, and Foggy had gone off to get drinks. While waiting, a girl chatted him up._

_“Hi, I’m Jessica. You can call me Jessie.”_

_“Uh... Just Jessica is fine. I’m Foggy, nice to meet you.”_

_It had seemed a bit weird to Matt. He could sense Foggy’s arousal so she must be attractive, and refusing someone’s nickname was a weird way of flirting, but he didn’t think anything of it._

Hard as he tried to figure out the common denominator, Matt just did not understand. He didn’t even know for sure if it was the conversations or some visual thing he could not pick up on, but the little skips in Foggy’s heartbeat didn’t seem to be bound to any particular location either.

It was frustrating because Foggy never gave any indication that something was wrong that someone without heightened senses could have noticed, nothing that Matt could use as an opportunity to ask Foggy what the skips meant. Because no such opportunity presents itself and because Matt thought he might go insane trying to figure out what caused the reactions so he wouldn’t inadvertently hurt him, Matt one day just... asked.

“Foggy?”

They were both sitting on their beds, reading their notes for an upcoming test. It wasn’t a big one, so the atmosphere was relaxed rather than stressed. It was late at night and at this point, Matt was too tired to really take in any more of a subject he didn’t find particularly interesting in the first place so he thought it was as good a time as any to finally get some answers.

“Yeah, buddy, what’s up?”

“You remember a few days ago, when we talked about where to go for dinner?”

Foggy laughed. “You’re gonna have to be more specific than that. It’s a conversation we’ve had a lot, and if I may add, it would be a good conversation to have right now because I am _starving_. What do ya think, pizza?”

“Sure, pizza sounds good. But...” But I need you to answer my question so I can finally have some peace of mind, Matt thought.

“But?”

“I think we decided on Thai, from that place near Rico’s.”

“Oh. That was... Monday, was it? What do you want on your pizza, grilled veggies, extra mushrooms?” Matt was frustrated. He needed Foggy to take this seriously and to help him out because Matt had no idea how to actually get him to talk about what was going on. The pizza could wait forever for all he cared.

“I... yeah, sounds fine. But Foggy –”

He heard rustling – Foggy put down his book and turned to face Matt.

“Listen, if you want to ask something, just ask. I promise I won’t break. And you seem adamant so at this point I’m curious because I honestly have no idea what this is about.” His heartbeat showed that he was saying the truth. Shit. Matt would have to try harder to get Foggy to understand Matt’s question without actually asking the question.

“It’s just that you seemed upset. And I was wondering whether I said anything wrong or –”

“I seemed upset over getting Thai food? I definitely don’t remember that.”

“No.” Matt tried very hard not to let his frustration show, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded. “You suggested something else – probably pizza again – and you said something about raising your eyebrow seductively?”

_“By the way, I’m raising my eyebrow seductively at your right now, Murdock.”_

_Matt snickered. “What does that even look like?”_

_“I don’t know man, you know what my flirting skills entail, you’ve tried to play wingman before and it’s worked exactly zero times. You really shouldn’t be asking me that.” Foggy was laughing, his shirt moving as his stomach vibrated. Foggy’s uninhibited laughs were some of Matt’s favorite sounds._

_“Well it’s not like people seductively raised their eyebrow at me as a kid, I don’t have any visual reference point here.” Matt smirked, as he always did with these kinds of jokes. Foggy pretended to hate what he called Matt’s “awful corny blind jokes”, but Matt could hear him try to suppress laughter each time._

_But Foggy wasn’t laughing. For a moment, he fell silent, and all Matt could hear was that little skip in his heart again, that frustrating, unexplainable skip. Then Foggy laughed out loud once, but it was not the same sincere laughter from before. Matt’s smirk had vanished from his face._

_“So... pizza?” Matt suggested cautiously._

_“Nah, let’s get something else. I don’t think my arteries can take any more grease. Besides, I think it’s your turn to pick something anyway and I know pizza isn’t your first choice.”_

“Oh.” 

There it was again! The skip in Foggy’s heartbeat! Matt stayed silent, waiting for Foggy to elaborate.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Matty. It’s just...”

Just _what_?

Foggy lay down on his bed, and for a moment Matt thought that this was the end of the conversation. But Foggy’s breathing pattern suggested he was working up to saying something, and Matt realised that Foggy just needed to put some distance between them for this conversation, so he mirrored him and also lay down, face directed towards the ceiling.

Sometimes people found it easier to do something if they were not making eye contact, Matt knew that, and even though he couldn’t actually look at anything or anyone, he could sometimes hear them turn their faces away from his before saying something difficult. Matt didn’t care – it didn’t make any difference to his perception whether someone was looking at him or not or whether he was facing them or not, and if it helped, he wasn’t going to complain.

So they lay there, on separate beds, both silent. Until Foggy started talking and told Matt a story that made him both wish he’d never asked in the first place and to hear every detail so he could use it and find the person who hurt his friend.

“When I was twelve, my parents and I decided I should spend Christmas Eve with my – have I ever mentioned my mum is not my birth mother?”

He had not, but Matt stayed quiet. He didn’t want to stop Foggy now he’d finally started talking.

“Well, either way, I have a birth mother and her name is Rosalind and she’s important for this story but not really for... everything else, you know? She gave birth to me, but that’s about where the positive influence on my life ends. So anyway, I spent Christmas Eve with Rosalind.”

This whole time, his heart was beating fast. He was nervous, anxious.

“It wasn’t a big celebration, not like Nelson parties. You know what those are like, I’ve subjected you to our craziness often enough.” He gave a short laugh, but there was no joy behind it. Matt didn’t like the sound of that laugh at all.

“It was me and Rosalind and her parents and her... two of her brothers were there as well.”

_“Do you think you’ll ever have kids?”_

_“I don’t know. I don’t usually think that far ahead, try to concentrate on the present. Like this exam you should be studying for, Foggy.”_

_“Pff, we have plenty of time for that later. Now is the time for beer and deep, meaningful conversations that we’ll have forgotten by tomorrow morning! The whole “Do you believe in God?” thing is moot because I know the answer so. Kids. Spouses. The important things in life, Murdock, none of this academic bullshit.”_

_“Good luck getting through law school with that attitude.”_

_“I’ll be fine. Pleeenty of time to study later.”_

_“If you let me study some more now, in silence, I’ll make you godfather to all my children and let you spoil them, uncle Foggy.”_

_Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba...-dum._

_“Hmm... I think I’d prefer just Foggy.”_

What did the uncles do? Matt clenched his jaw, clenched his fists. It had been a long time since his lessons with Stick ended, but Matt had kept up his training whenever he could. He used his senses every day and his fists at least three times a week, whenever he had time to cram in a workout at Fogwell’s. He wouldn’t mind using his skills a bit more... hands-on again.

“He took me upstairs after dinner.” Foggy sounded so uncertain, so... small. It was killing Matt.

“He’d been really nice all evening, and naive as I was, I enjoyed the attention. I thought that even if I wouldn’t be close to Rosalind, I might have some kind of relationship with him, you know? Gain a new uncle.” He snorted and again, it was a cold, derisive sound. It sounded nothing like the good-natured, friendly, warm Foggy Matt knew.

“Well, turned out that he was a bit friendlier than I thought.”

Oh God. Oh _God_. Matt felt like he needed some time to process what Foggy implied, the pure horror of it, but Foggy just went on.

“It wasn’t rape. It wasn’t... He didn’t get that far. Maybe he wanted to, maybe... I don’t know. But he kissed me ( _“I just don’t really like when characters kiss-attack each other. There’s something romantic about asking for permission first.”_ ) and he touched me... ( _“Some guy at the supermarket touched my ass by accident and for a second I thought he was coming onto me, ha!” Foggy joked as if it were no big deal but Matt could hear the stutter in his heart. He knew better.)_ And he called me...”

Big boy.

Matt had called Foggy that once, as a joke, told him to be a big boy and get dressed because they were late for class. Every muscle in Foggy’s body had seemed to have tensed for a moment and Matt hadn’t been able to figure out why. It hadn’t been just a small hitch in his heartbeat but a full-body reaction and Matt had wondered what might have caused it but he’d never made the connection to all the other things.

Now he knew.

Matt wanted to curl up into a ball of grief for what Foggy had gone through and punch the uncle until he was unconscious and hug Foggy until all the sadness had seeped out of him. But he couldn’t move. All he could do was lie there and listen as Foggy went on talking.

“I smiled at him. I was terrified and I didn’t know what was happening, but I didn’t want to make it worse by making him angry so I just smiled and played along, and then I pretended I heard Rosalind call me and excused myself so fucking politely and I went downstairs. I told her what happened. Rosalind was in the kitchen, alone, and so I told her and I was so scared and I trusted her to help me. She didn’t believe me.”

Matt wanted to puke. How could this possibly have got even worse?

“She didn’t fucking believe me. So I called my parents and they took me home. And I... I cried all night. I didn’t leave the house at all for the rest of the holidays because I thought he might... I don’t know.”

There was silence between them.

Matt broke it because he needed to know, “Did you tell your parents?”. He needed to know Foggy got help.

“I did. Eventually. And they wanted me to go to a therapist –” Yes! “– but I refused. I thought that if I agreed to a therapist, they’d know how bad it really was. So I downplayed it. Said I was fine.”

Foggy definitely wasn’t fine. The smell of salt in the air and the sound of his forcibly controlled but still too loud breathing proved as much.

But they were going to get through this. Because Foggy was tough and Matt was stubborn, and now that he knew the problem, he could finally start on solving it. But first –

“Matt?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve been awfully quiet this whole time.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt. Thought it might be easier for you to get it all out at once.”

“Yeah, well, I’m done now. That’s my great tale of woe.”

Matt stayed silent. His head was filled with rants about how unfair all of this was and confessions of how much Foggy meant to him and offers of beating the uncle black and blue, but none of that was appropriate for the situation, so he tried to keep it all in. Better not open his mouth at all lest he said something wrong.

“Your silence is worrying me.”

“Sorry.”

Foggy sighed. “Are you okay?”

What? “Am... Am I okay? I should be asking you that. It doesn’t matter how I’m feeling when –”

“– It does matter. It always matters how you’re feeling, but that’s a discussion for another day. I’ve had years to think about this – and trust me, I have thought about this plenty – and I know it can be kind of a lot. So again, are you okay?”

“I...” Matt sighed. “Yes, Foggy, I’m okay. Are you?”

“Yeah. Feels good to let it out sometimes, you know? I haven’t talked about this to anyone in years so sometimes it feels like it wasn’t even real. Like it just exists in my head but not in the real world.”

“Well, if you want to talk about it, I’m always here to listen.”

“Thanks, buddy. But I’m good for now.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.”

“So... pizza?”

Foggy snorted, and finally it was a genuine laugh again.

“Yeah, man, _pizza_. I want all of the toppings. And you’re paying.”

That was fine by Matt. He wanted to help Foggy any way he could, and if that included not talking about what happened and providing unhealthy but delicious food, then he would happily do just that.


End file.
